New laws expected to improve the lives of California’s undocumented residents

Daniel Acevedo listens to Pablo Alvarado, the Executive Director of National Day Laborer Organizing Network at the Pasadena Job Center Thursday, October 10, 2013. Alvarado is discussing new legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that makes it easier for undocumented immigrants to assimilate.
Photos by Walt Mancini/Pasadena Star-News

Maria Zamorano feels she can breathe a little easier after numerous California bills affecting undocumented immigrants, including one that will allow them to obtain driver’s licenses, were signed by Gov. Jerry Brown this month.

The undocumented single mom from Mexico was fortunate, she said, to avoid confiscation of her car after a Pasadena police officer stopped her October 7 and she couldn’t produce a valid driver’s license. After Zamorano, 45, showed the officer identification cards from the Mexican Consulate and the Pasadena Community Job Center, she called the center’s coordinator to drive her car back to avoid its confiscation.

“Even though I don’t have a license, I drive anyway because I need my car for work,” Zamorano, who lives in Highland Park and has a cleaning service, said in Spanish from the center. “In the majority of accidents, people flee out of fear because they don’t have a license or documentation ... and they’re afraid that they’ll be handed over to immigration officials.”

Meanwhile, Ryan Herrera of Victorville is having second thoughts about pursuing a career as a trucker after Brown signed Assembly Bill 60, which for the first time in two decades allows undocumented residents to apply for driver’s licenses by 2015. Herrera, 30, said he and his father were displaced by undocumented immigrants during a carpentry job in the High Desert some eight years ago, and he has had difficulty competing with them for other jobs since. Though the bill states that a person cannot obtain a commercial driver’s license without a Social Security number, he said it still concerns him because fraudulent Social Security cards can be obtained.

“At this point, it’s a question in my head: is it worth paying the money (to get trained) if I’m going to be turned down and have an illegal alien replace me?” Herrera said.

After Brown signed the recent bills, advocates are hailing California as a leader in integrating some 2.5 million undocumented residents in the state while comprehensive immigration reform is stalled in Congress.

Among them is Assembly Bill 4, also called The Trust Act, which prohibits local authorities from holding those with questionable immigration status longer than necessary to transfer them to federal immigration officials, unless they’re suspected of committing serious or violent crimes. Advocates argue that people who have been held on immigration detainers include those who have cases that are dismissed against them or have committed low-level or status-based crimes, such as driving without a license.

“I think California, with this legislation, has proven itself to be the national leader in immigrant integration,” said Thomas Saenz, general counsel and president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which sponsored AB 4. “It means there will be a much, much reduced fear that people who are simply leading peaceful lives will be ripped out of their families and their communities.”

But critics argue the Golden State is becoming “a sanctuary state” for the undocumented and that the new laws make it easier for them to come, stay and take jobs away from already struggling legal citizens.

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Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Twin Peaks, argued that AB 4 should be called the anti-Trust Act because it erodes faith between local and federal law enforcement officials while tying the hands of local authorities to enforce the law.

“If you look at all the bills Gov. Jerry Brown signed, every one of them is an exemption or carve-out for those that came here illegally,” said Donnelly, who recently announced his plans to run for governor in 2014. “There is not a single thing he’s doing to help a person who is a legal immigrant, who has come here legally, respected our rules and our processes.”

About half of the state’s undocumented immigrants have been in the country longer than a decade and are thus woven into the state’s fabric, said Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. One sixth of the state’s children have at least one undocumented parent and about 85 percent of those children are U.S.-born.

“There’s a big frustration building in the state of California about the fact that Washington is not moving on comprehensive immigration reform — not just large immigrant communities and their allies, but also the business community that’s been quite supportive of immigration reform, including businesses in the Silicon Valley, the Central Valley and groups like the L.A. Chamber of Commerce,” Pastor said, noting that the issues of eligible high-skilled workers and legal agricultural labor are also being weighed in Congress.

Meanwhile, Brown said he’s “forging ahead” with state legislation, most of which will go into effect in January, intended to ease the challenges undocumented residents face in their daily lives. He signed a bill, for example, that allows undocumented residents to be admitted as attorneys and another that provides for suspension or revocation of an employer’s business license — as well as a penalty of up to $10,000 — for retaliation against employees based on their immigration status. Another bill Brown signed in September, which gives certain domestic workers overtime pay for working more than nine hours a day or 45 hours in a week, is also expected to benefit many undocumented, said Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day Labor Organizing Network.

Alvarado said the conditions for undocumented immigrants in the state have declined over the last two decades. After the 1994 passage of Proposition 187, which sought to limit services to undocumented residents but was later deemed unconstitutional, he’s seen businesses deny services to those suspected of being undocumented and employers who have threatened and robbed workers of wages. But with the recent signing of the bills, “for the first time, I felt like a Californian,” said Alvarado, who was undocumented for years until he married a U.S. citizen and became naturalized. “I felt this time, our state is not just enjoying the fruits of our labor but recognizing our humanity.”

These bills will help to bring people “out of the shadows,” affording them both rights and responsibilities while curbing abuse and exploitation of undocumented residents that is all too common, said Lucero Chavez, an immigrant rights attorney for the ACLU of Southern California.

But Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the new laws will harm and even endanger the safety of the state’s legal citizens, who are already suffering from high unemployment and recidivism rates.

With AB 4, he said, the governor and Legislature are willing to sacrifice public safety by turning criminals here illegally back out onto the streets rather than cooperate with federal immigration authorities to have them deported.

“Clearly the priority in serving the interest of illegal aliens extends even to criminal aliens” in California, Mehlman said.

However one feels about the new legislation, what happens in California is often a harbinger of what’s to come in the nation largely because demographic and generational trends here often lead the rest of the country, Pastor said.

“California is America fast forward,” Pastor said. “We went through fights around undocumented immigrants 20 or 25 years ago that have been going on in the last couple of years in Arizona and other parts of the country. Where we are right now is where the country goes later.”